7 Must-Have, Lesser-Known Tools for Search Marketers

By Jeff Campbell, VP, Senior Account Director

In the spirit of giving, here are a few lesser-known tools I’ve come across that have made my life easier:

  1. AdGooRoo – There are many uses for this tool (see website for details) – but I love it for two things: 1) making sure my top performing PPC keywords have full exposure and top rank, and 2) quickly assessing my ever-changing competition.
  2. Roboform – The best $30 I’ve ever spent. Roboform bookmarks and remembers all of your usernames and passwords. As Search Marketers, we are dealing with engine logins, webmaster tools, research accounts, trade press logins, web analytics, 80 shopping comparison engines, and 2 fantasy football teams. A few advantages with Roboform is it appears with both IE & Firefox, is easily transferrable between home and work computers, and can also store form data such as addresses and credit card numbers for a quick auto-fill.
  3. SnagIt – Not a day goes by that I don’t use this for emails or presentations. If you are dealing with visual people, this is the ultimate screen shot tool to rely on ‘showing’ vs. ‘telling’. You can screen grab certain regions, dropdown menus, or entire scrolling pages. Then there is a basic editor to add text, arrows, effects, sizing, and more. See screen shot in #7 for an example.
  4. Advanced Operator Searches – This isn’t a tool, per se, but a fast and free shortcut when researching. My particular favs are the “link:” search and the “site:” search. Very helpful in SEO to determine who is linking to your website content (and if they are quality sites) and to determine if your entire site is being indexed properly, respectively.
  5. Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) – Listen, I grew up using WebPosition Gold, but it’s time to move on. AWR provides better scheduling options, outputs in various formats for easy integration with web analytics data or larger databases, provides easy white hat settings (aka avoid engine spamming & IP bans…no jinx!), and a wide range of reporting, trending, and graphing.
  6. Google Website Optimizer – OK, you’ve heard about this, but I still can’t believe more folks aren’t using it. Data beats opinion, stop guessing and start testing. ‘Nuff said.
  7. Web Developer Firefox Add-on – With 8.5MM total downloads, it’s already well known by the developer community, but it’s use for Search Engine Optimization needs to be mentioned. As an SEO, you are constantly hovering over images for alt text, viewing the page source for meta information, disabling JavaScript to look for a non-flash version or visiting W3C.org for validation. Wouldn’t it be nice to have shortcuts to do all this (and more) in just one toolbar. Well, look no further; this Firefox Add-on is here to help.

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Enjoy, I hope there was at least one new tool on there for you – please add any additions in the comments section below.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great post.

Obviously I am already using Snagit and agree completely about roboform.

was heading of to load adgooro, but the page is getting a timeout... That doesn't appear comforting.

CJeffCampbell said...

Peter - adgooroo is an online interface, there is no need to download anything. It is a bit buggy though with page errors happening somewhat frequently.

 
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